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My body was animal to me then. I still thought of it as something made to do what I wanted, belonging to me only.
Watching these girls fold themselves into the dining room chairs she had just dusted a winter’s worth of insect corpses from, knowing we were in danger, but not how much, exactly, or how to convince us of it. Knowing, anyway, that we wouldn’t listen.
We abandoned ourselves to this safer lake for a while. Splashing, throwing our bodies here and there. We competed to see who could bring up the most interesting things from the deep bottom, fistfuls of gravel, little stones and larger stones, bits of sticks and plant matter, like we were God looking for enough material to make the world.
Twottb
Abigail nodded primly. She pointed at a tree on the shore that was yellowing where it was not supposed to, the pallor of dead pine boughs. “That’s because of a beetle. It’s killing all the trees around here. That’s why the fire alert is higher this year, because most of the trees are dead.”
When Vienna laughed, her mouth became a new animal, this sleek rabbit-pulsed thing taking up residence on her face.
At the time this made sense, though, that there was only the one way to let something into my body, that it couldn’t enter me unless I allowed it.
The Viper-King hails from Scandinavia. At least, Dad’s pretty sure.
Dad dug his nails into his hands until he bled. He couldn’t understand it, he just couldn’t understand it, why any person would lie like that, for sport and nothing else.
Dorothy watches an ant carry a dead ant over a crack in the sidewalk. “Yeah,” she says. What else is she supposed to say?
That’s really all it is, knowing how stuff comes together, knowing where the hard edges are.
The last category was hardest. Dad would have Dorothy’s scalp if she so much as thought of him as a “conspiracy theorist.” And he isn’t, really. But Dad’s quest was a necessary part of the equation. The best she could manage was how many people believed in Bigfoot (13.5%). Dad doesn’t, but Dorothy has to make do. That brings her total number to 1,870.29.
She smiles a lot, right away, a lot of little separate smiles like she’s laughing at something,
Still, the Viper-King seems to her like continental drift, like global warming, like the slow, inexorable crawl of time. For Dorothy, not believing in it is being an atheist in a time when the gods descended from the heavens with their hands out.
Elaine sits inside, on their slatted table, swaying back and forth with her nose pressed to the crack where the window is leveraged open. Her shoulder blades glitter over the lip of her top, sharp enough that her skin is almost translucent around them.
Snake like
When the Viper-King bursts up from the corn, Dorothy drops to her knees, an instinctive reaction, duck-and-cover.
There are still chunks of fat floating in the pan, the rest going toward a faintly golden liquid. It shivers when Dorothy touches the bread to it. The crust comes away glittering, and Dorothy does not allow herself to look at it long before she puts it in her mouth.
Dorothy sees that one of the cows in the next field is pregnant. She sees the fetus curled inside it, its pink, alien body translucent and veined with dark blood, the flat moonstone of its underdeveloped eye. She sees the knotted hair network of the corn roots beneath the ground, and the deep, wide tunnel that the Viper’s body cut far beneath them. She sees, and shies away from, the long, cool mass of its life, its hundreds of years of slow knowledge, its enormity of consciousness and simplicity of thought, knowing without interest, without analysis.
Dorothy sees that her father wanted the fat for the same reason that she took it, because she was able, because it was there.
Snake oil
I’d known as long as I could remember that Aunt Vera was not capable of having children.
sibling in potentia,
Parasitoid wasps, which instead of stingers have a needle-sharp ovipositor and deposit their larvae beneath the host’s skin. I’d learned about them in the spring, when my mother brought a monarch cocoon inside for me and it sat, inert, in a little plastic terrarium on my dresser, slowly darkening with black splotches as the wasp ate away inside it. After learning what the splotches meant, my mother shook the cocoon out onto the cement of our driveway and crushed it with her foot. I had wanted to keep it; just long enough to see the wasp come wriggling out.
The orchid mantis was my favorite, extraordinarily delicate, with a waxy pink body fading to white at its pointed limbs, and eyes like opal beads set against its skull. “This is what fairies look like.”
Nothing magical is safe, nothing safe is magical. I knew that from reading fairy tales.
Ruth considered this, putting her head at an angle. “What about the scientists?” This had occurred to me, and so I was proud of Ruth for thinking to ask it. “Sometimes they let entomologists look at them, because they like to have pictures of themselves drawn, and they like to be given food. But if they don’t like it, and someone bothers them, they kill them.” “Really?” I took the mantis back from Ruth, and I set it on the flat back of my hand, the sheen of its body on my own skin. “They climb on people’s faces while they sleep, and they put a spell on their nose and their mouth, so they die.”
I was thinking about the anatomy doll, about someone coming to my aunt Vera’s bed in the middle of the night and opening her body like a treasure chest, petting their finger over the red-purple lining of her organs, shifting them about, so they could reach in and wrench out her fetus.
diffident.
In the third grade, I had heard a story about a girl who ran away from home, and was mauled and eaten by a mountain lion. I had decided that it had to be in this place that it had happened; there was the tree house the girl had built herself, there was the ground where she was eaten.
“Did you know there’s a kind of butterfly,” I told Ruth, our sweating knees slicked together in the backseat of my dad’s car—he was driving us to the hospital—“that makes ants raise its young?” “How does it do that?” My father craned his neck to look back at us through the rearview mirror. His radio blared cheerful, innocuous country music. “The larva of the Alcon blue butterfly smells like an ant baby to an ant, so the ants take them back into the nest and raise them. And the ants feed them more than even their own babies.”
We came into Aunt Vera’s room then, which we entered by pulling back a curtain. Aunt Vera was contained like a dead bird in a cardboard box, set in four small white walls. On one side of her bed was a window, which looked out over the hospital parking lot. It was winter, and the sun was already setting, spreading a low orange glimmer over the parked cars.
I stroked her hair and told her about tricksy fairies weaving babies together from sticks and vines. The world was full of frightful things, but I knew about them and so I could help her.
“Your mother’s alive,” I snapped at Ruth, too loud, my voice too much of a crack in the evening-stained air. A car blew past below us, and I waited until it was gone. “Your mother’s alive,” I said again. “She just didn’t want you. Aunt Vera wanted you.”
I saw her now unbelonging, her rejection of us, of me, even as hard as I had tried to make her mine. How she was lost to me beyond hope of regaining and I was not sure, anymore, why I had even wanted her.
Bitch, please
Most people are familiar with Casey’s more famous work. Her story “Kitchen Things,” about a woman who made a set of silverware from her husband’s bones, was taught in a lot of college classes alongside “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Cora smiled, stretched until her spine gave a ratcheting crack. “Yeah. It’s pretty spooky.” Esther waited. She pressed her hand on the arm of the love seat, muscle quivering a little under her own weight. She was suddenly afraid the sofa would collapse beneath her. Esther thought of how this story had made her feel the first time she read it, vivisected and pinned open, all the softest, pinkest parts of her exposed. And then every reading after, as if Anais reached into that gap and pressed a curious finger to Esther’s heart, softly fondled the sack of her lung. The sweet stab of being touched
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When Esther showed Cora the letter in Kitchen Witch, Cora read it with great care. Esther appreciated this, that she leaned in so far that her forehead nearly touched the page, her back an arch where Esther could see the bumps of her spine. Esther had always envied those bumps on skinny women, that delicate evidence of bones.
Esther was dimly aware that Hope’s family was Christian fundamentalist. Her awareness of what that meant was even vaguer, except that she had a list of forbidden topics of conversation that included dinosaurs, trick-or-treating, ghosts, and politics.
Lmao
When Esther tried to explain Anais to Cora properly, it was something she was angry to find she didn’t really have words for, could only come at sideways by telling stories about herself.
Esthers relationship wkth anias is big
“I don’t ever want to not know something about her.” The only way to really love someone is to know them. Even more so, Esther thinks, that is what love can be broken down to. That is what intimacy is. With enough love you could conjure someone perfectly in a room they are not in.
abjection.”
“It’s the idea that sometimes, when we reject someone or something—violently, that is—it’s because we see ourselves in it.”
Of course, Esther had crushes, had Hope and her Algebra II tutor, whom she liked to imagine giving things to: pretty notebooks, packaged pastries from the corner store, a necklace. She had an entire adolescence of baffled, stomach-aching love.
On the morning before I went away to boarding school, my mother made eggs for breakfast and let me take one to tell my fortune. I poured the egg white into hot water and picked out shapes in the cooking tendrils: a star, a leopard, the lifting anchor of a ship. Something very beautiful was going to happen to me. My suitcase stood by the door, full of dark blue socks and oxford shirts, waiting. But I did not want to go to Rowland Girls’ School. I wanted to crawl under the porch stairs, lie down, forget language, let my teeth fall out, and become a soft, sleeping animal.
wish . . .” Cora’s voice startles Esther, and she hesitates a moment, so Esther knocks her forehead against the soft skin of Cora’s neck, not sure whether she is reassuring or seeking reassurance. Regardless, Cora is warm there. “I’m sorry. I wish I understood enough to help.”
I think the last story was like an egg. That is not a metaphor I’m going to explain to you. I am trying my hand at them now too, and if you can tell me how it was like an egg and you are right, then maybe I will tell you more of what I thought of it.
The place where her body entered the ground is a little greener than the rest. Foxglove grows graciously out of it. There’s no getting used to that passage under-the-hill. Naomi would call herself a steady person, comfortable with a measured amount of danger. Still, when she walks into the green earth, she shuts her eyes, holds her breath, her pulse races in her wrists. The only truly bad moment is when the dirt is all around her, damp and hot and always heavier than she’s prepared for. She comes out on the other side choking and has to balance herself with her palm shoved against the soft
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Tam Lin:
...Tamlin? ACOTAR?
Naomi has won. “Take the pot, Fiddler.” Menagerie nods to her, a liquidly measured gesture, Naomi can almost hear the tick tick tick of his neck turning, gears as fine as Oracle’s hands. He smiles.
Oracle bets a cage of black salamanders with real fires flickering in their bellies.
Naomi won Midsummer Switch with a Full Court hand.
Picking at her cuticles like you still pick at your cuticles, though you have the self-control now to stop before they bleed.
